Nighthawk

When I went to graduate school, at the University of Alabama at the age of twenty-six, I had never been responsible for procuring, much less preparing, my own food. Until that point, my mother and my grandmother had doted on me as if I were some late Roman emperor. As a boy, all I’d had to do to get a fried-bologna-and-onion sandwich delivered to me in front of the television was call for one. And if I happened to mention to my grandmother that I would love to have a pound cake, or an apple pie, or a banana pudding when we went to her house for Sunday dinner, then a pound cake, or an apple pie, or a banana pudding would miraculously appear. After college, I’d had an apartment of my own, but it was in my home town, in western North Carolina, and most nights I’d eaten at Mom’s.

Once my dad had backed the U-Haul out of the driveway of my new apartment, in Tuscaloosa, I went inside and wondered, Damn. What am I supposed to eat? I rifled through the pots and pans my mother had sent with me as if I might find a pound cake buried beneath them. I examined a muffin tin, which might as well have been a piece of wreckage from an alien spacecraft. It never occurred to me to make muffins.

I asked other students what they ate. Their answers were less than appetizing. One friend existed almost entirely on Hot Pockets and frozen burritos. Another was stricken with catastrophic flatulence after eating too much hummus. She called me in tears and said, “I can’t stand to live with me anymore.”

Left to my own devices, for breakfast I ate cheese crackers. For lunch, I made bologna sandwiches, unfried, with no onion. For dinner, I developed three go-to meals: Lean Cuisine glazed-chicken dinners on a bed of ramen noodles; spaghetti doused in either Ragù or Prego sauce, depending on my mood; and an obscure cut of steak I’d discovered at the disreputable end of the supermarket meat section, fried in butter and garlic powder. The chicken and ramen never disappointed. The steak required considerable gnawing to get down, but it wasn’t bad with ketchup. I watched “Cops” on television while I ate and sipped a glass or two of Bulgarian Cabernet. The wine made me feel sophisticated.

But, once the excitement of lighting an ancient gas stove with a match had worn off, I discovered the aching hunger—unconquerable by even the largest plate of spaghetti and entire bottles of Communist reds—that is peculiar to eating too often alone. Belatedly, I understood that the sustenance contained in food you cook for yourself is almost entirely biological, and that sometimes what makes a fried-bologna-and-onion sandwich so delicious has nothing to do with the bologna or the onion.

I began to frequent the inexpensive restaurants on the strip, compulsively downing pepperoni-pizza slices at Tut’s or cheeseburgers and fries at the Kwik Snak, simply because there were other people there. Of course, eating alone in restaurants populated almost entirely by undergraduates served up its own flavor of despair. Still, the staff at these places soon began to recognize me, and every time the woman behind the counter at Chang’s said, “Triple Crown, large Mountain Dew?,” it felt almost like affection. I began to think of myself in the third person, and to imagine what I looked like from the street. He hoped he looked like a writer, an artist thinking thoughts that no one had ever thought before, and not just some miserable graduate student, trapped in a low-rent version of Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks.” Alone at Tut’s late at night, he played the same Paula Abdul song on the jukebox over and over. If somebody else came in, he pretended he hadn’t done it.

Eventually, a few months after I’d added nightly trips to a bar to my solitary rounds, I decided to move back to North Carolina, and to marry a girl I’d developed a crush on while attending church with another girl. Sarah sang in the choir, and, when she stood to sing solos, the auburn highlights in her hair glowed in the sunlight falling through the stained-glass windows. I thought she sounded like Dinah Shore. She didn’t know that I’d moved home to marry her, so I was able to catch her off guard. Her culinary skill was a collateral blessing. She does not, however, dote. She cooks; I clean up. I get our two daughters dressed in the morning; she makes them breakfast. Sarah is a vegetarian and would not make me a fried-bologna sandwich under any circumstances, but she keeps the refrigerator stocked with fresh pesto and homemade spaghetti sauce and the girls’ favorite soup. For my birthday, she makes key-lime pie, easily the most delicious food I have ever tasted. We have been married for nineteen years. I like to imagine that any lonely graduate student looking in at the four of us as we share our evening meal would find us worthy of envy. ♦